13 amazing places to search for engaging content ideas

Creating befitting engaging content ideas that make you distinguish your brand, product or service from the millions of its likes online can be quite stressful sometimes. Content comprises of those essential elements that attracts your ideal customers to you.

It might be the combination of videos, images, articles or blog, and infographic etc. Content creation and the ability to be consistent are one of the biggest challenge when it comes to content marketing. However, knowing where to find insight on what matters most to prospects is key to staying relevant.

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Creating great content is critical and becoming even more important, not just for bloggers, but all website owners. Great content will get you higher search engine rankings from more links, increased visitors and subscribers, and credibility.

Sometimes, I also get stock with trying to get the right source of content for my ideal audience but I noticed we have a lot stirring straight into our eyes. One thing with sourcing for content is, you have to be innovative, understand your audience and identify your medium of disseminating or distributing the content.

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For example, with blogs, you can run away with virtually anything, ranging from infographic to video and even images but platforms differ with the type of content you can publish on them.

This is not to say that those platforms don’t accept things like that but it most times it has restriction to the type of content due to the nature of the platform.

Earlier, I said you can publish virtually anything on your blog but for a platform like LinkedIn, it is a more formal forum.

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Therefore, they types of content will differ from that of Facebook or Instagram. This post will help you with some great sources for content generation.

News feeds are important sources of developing engaging content ideas

‘Ding’! That’s the sound that pops alongside one of those news feed sites like Google alert, Google+ and even social platforms feeds. News feeds are basically one of the easiest ways to get interesting articles, stories, trends and topics that you can develop as your content.

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With new innovations and trends, there is always news round the clock and always something to write about. You really can never go wrong with news feeds. You can use keywords related to your niche and have a set of fresh posts brought to your email inbox every day.

If you find that your keywords aren’t bringing the right content in, you can always delete the alert by clicking “Manage your alerts” in the lower-left corner.

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It is important you put your audience into consideration before giving them the sort of information you have gathered.

You should give them content that will keep them engaged. Don’t forget, your audience is key in content development.

Social media

The social media is a very busy place. There are lots of activities happening on social media at the same time. This is also a very viable ground to get various content ideas ranging from pictures, articles and videos.

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For example, most bloggers share links to probably a recent blog post they just wrote on social media so that their friends and others can link up and read through what they have.

For me, I read through the articles and most times use the topic I am most interested in.

Crowdsourcing or outsourcing

I guess you know you can pay someone for an idea or concept right?

That shouldn’t be something new. People contract and pay other to deliver an idea to them. Often times, it’s mostly with images or videos because those are highly creative and engaging elements when it comes to content.

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There are ways that you can pay to get ideas from other people. Amazon Mechanical Turk can be used as a source of inexpensive ideas. You can also meet up with the person selling out an idea to you.

For most companies, bloggers etc, they hire the services of people who are proficient in content development which makes it easy for them to brainstorm on ideas together and finally come to an agreement.

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This makes work less stressful and easy for you because you can’t afford to do everything and be everywhere all at once.

Socially curated sites

Bloggers often use curated sites to share their articles, posts, videos and even images. Sites like Reedit and growthhackers are some of the most used curated sites.

The thing is, writers and bloggers alike share content using these mediums to engage their audience and drive web traffic. Therefore, this is an amazing opportunity to get interesting topics for your content.

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Sometimes, a comment or question on one a particular post can spur you into getting an idea for your next content. It is of utmost relevance to keep in tune with such sites, because they come in handy.

Feedback’s and questions from your audience or customers

The best marketing content is answering people’s common questions. Online visitors always have questions to ask, opinions to share and comments to drop; so, why don’t you use this as an opportunity to craft out something interesting and broader for the rest of your web visitors.

There is this whole thing of people working at your company — the sales and services pros — that are fielding people’s questions all day long. Not only do they know the common questions; they also know the answers to them. Like the back of their hand, in fact.

Ask them to write down the questions they get asked all the time, along with the answers they give. If the answer is meaty enough, it can stand alone as a blog post. Or, you can compile several questions and answers for a kind of FAQ-style blog post.

In-house source (brainstorming with colleagues and friends)

You shouldn’t bear the burden of content creation all on your own; ask employees to pitch in and share a bit of that burden with you.

Depending on the size of your marketing team, you could set contribution requirements for each person (this is ideal for a smaller marketing team) or for each sub-team (this is ideal for a larger marketing team).

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So you might require everyone in your team to write two blog posts a month, and one lead generation offer per quarter.

Or, if you’re working on a very large team with many smaller teams with rapidly shifting priorities, set content contribution requirements that jive with the team’s size and monthly priorities.

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Remind them that creating content on a regular basis not only keeps their writing skills sharp (or design skills, if that’s their superpower); it helps them build up an online writing portfolio that will come in handy for the rest of their marketing careers.

Interviews help as another means of generating engaging content ideas

If you have connections with experts or thought leaders in your industry, ask them if you can set up a short interview with them that you can turn into a blog post. If you conduct the interview over email, the writing is already done for you.

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If you do it over the phone, simply record it and transcribe your conversation – there are even transcription services you can pay for if you’re really strapped for time.

You get some quick blog content, and your interviewee gets exposure to a new audience. Everybody wins!

Re-purpose your content

Take some of your existing content and present it in a different way or through a different medium. For example, you can take a podcast or video and create a text post. Remind visitors about a previous post and expand on it.

Remember that some of your newer readers may not have seen your past popular posts, so create a new post that ties into the old one and link to it.

Guest posting helps create engaging content ideas for bloggers

If content idea and creation is you toughest headache then you should consider leveraging guest contributors to help feed your content machine.

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This can come not only in the form of guest blog content – where bloggers write content for you and typically benefit by getting inbound links to their site within the content – but with co-written offer content, too.

For instance, you can either collaborate with co-marketing partners that you both will share mutual benefits because you each get exposure to one another’s audiences, as well as help in the content creation process.

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On the other hand, you can host a guest blogger without having a partnership and this also gives you both the edge over both audiences.

Content from blogs in your niche

Getting content ideas from other blogs or people in your niche is one smart way to go. It gives you the opportunity to share and show your own creative side without any hassle.

For example, your niche is health; it means you can check for topics on other health blogs. I bet you know you can’t be checking an entertainment blog for topics.

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It won’t serve you because you are all in different niches. You can also check you’re for the kind of topics experts in your niche write about.

For example, I get mails each time Neil Patel or Jeff Bullas has a new blog post. This helps me read through the post and in a situation where I pick an interest in one, I proceed to write on that topic. Am sure you will be thinking that it’s some form of repetition but it’s not.

People see things from diverse perspective; hence, you can add to the knowledge or give your own view(s) on that same topic. It is important you reed yourself off using same headings and copying verbatim as with the post you are using.

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It is important you give your own insight on the topic because it makes you stand out and looked at as a thought leader in the niche.

Update your previous post

Sometimes a topic you have previously written about is no longer up to date or you have some new insight to add to it. You can create a new blog post to share this information with your readers.

Personal experience, ideas or interest

Sharing your own personal thoughts and feelings can help you connect with your audience on a deeper level and create engaging content.

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Sometimes you can integrate some of your own interests with the core topic of your blog. Whenever you come up with a creative idea, be sure to write it down so that you don’t forget it later.

Search engines

Search engines are also a huge idea retrieval point.

Why did I say so?

It’s because, everything query by an internet user in a particular niche is all embedded on search engines.

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So once you type a particular keyword, I bet that you will get an overflow of articles, post, images and videos about that particular keyword.

Therefore, it’s left to you to select out of the many which you would prefer to go with. With search engines, it gets interesting because you have a Variety to select from: text, image, video, and infographic etc.

About
Faith Kure

Comments

We should remember that our content should include great ideas and messages which we want to communicate with our audience and should unique with our competitor to enhance audience relation.

While developing a content, need to transparent and honest it will really helpful to yield superb content which will great in message and that the audience expect from us. You have really shown a great stats for content marketing – it is strange to know whole graph. Eventually, thanks for sharing your informative facts with us.

Content as the popular saying goes is King on the internet. Therefore, it is important to get the right content for your audience but sometimes, it gets really difficult trying to generate a concept for your content. Hence, there are places you can look to for help which i have discussed about. Thanks for your comment.